3B4 
of Mongolian descent. The Andaman Islanders in the Bay of 
Bengal belonged to that class, and there could be no doubt, were 
driven from the mainland at a very early date, and they were 
perhaps ove of the most primitive forms of mankind extant, 
whilst the hills in southern Madras were a refuge for similar 
wild tribes. The second great class was descended from the 
Aryan race. History told us that they inhabited the great plains 
of central Asia, whence, at various times, and in different 
directions, they sent out offshoots, which materially affected the 
world. Westward, they moved to found the Persian Empire, to 
create classic Greece, to build the walls of Rome itself, and they 
reached so far as even our own islands, whilst south they struck, 
and eastward, forcing their way across the Himalayas into the 
rich plains of India. 
It was from diverse races—the non-Aryan and the Aryan 
intermarrying—that the present Hindu population was derived. 
But Hinduism was not so much a race distinction as the result 
of a social organisation and a religious movement. That social 
organisation rested upon caste, while the religious movement was 
a combination of Brahmin and Buddhist faith mixed with some 
of the ruder rites of the Scythic people. He shrank from 
approaching such a complex subject as caste, the one which, 
perhaps, more than any other, marked out the Oriental life from 
our own. Originally there were only four castes, the priest, the 
warrior, the husbandman, and the serf, but they had developed 
into innumerable class distinctions, observed with a painful and 
scrupulous rigidity. Caste, however, had its advantages. It 
regulated the industry, it relieved the distress, it defined even 
the religion of its members. It regulated the industry much in 
the same way as our own trades unions do here, by moderating 
competition and by enforcing certain trade holidays, whilst by 
taking levies from its members it was enabled to give relief in 
case of need, and under normal conditions, allowed none of its 
members to starve; and so it took the place and rendered 
unnecessary in India, the existence of our own Poor Law 
system. Besides that, it exercised a correcting influence on 
erring members, enforced by punishment varying in severity. 
Anglo-Indian law, however, did not enforce caste decrees, but it 
recognised and allowed them. Of the religion of the Hindus, 
with its complicated idolatry, he could make no more than a 
passing mention. With the Hindu all life was sacred, as the 
gift of God, and as a result of generations of mental and religious 
training, death was realised as a transition, and was not so much 
dreaded by the individual, as we found amongst a more active 
and excitable people like ourselves, and though idolatrous and 
approaching their gods at many and strange shrines, the end of 
all Hindu worship was to seek the liberation of the soul from 
